Artifice, anarchy and ass-whoopin’: Hobbes in the squared circle

This thesis addresses the performance methodology of kayfabe used in professional wrestling from a Hobbesian lens, to analyse audience and performer communicative structures. By applying Hobbes’s principles of performative legibility to the coproduction of signs and signifiers between audiences and professional wrestlers at live and televised professional wrestling events, the thesis demonstrates that an analogous application of the lexicon as described by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) can be utilised for more pressing analysis of communicative lexicons and performative orders in adjacent fields of political, business and industry analysis. To address this application, I will demonstrate how attempts to classify professional wrestling as sport, theatre or performance art often fail to register the work of artifice involved in subscribing to a lexicon of performative legibility. I argue that performance practices that focus on genuine acts of competition or the revelation of authenticity are counter to the needs of professional wrestling’s performance lexicon, which positions embodied codified legibility as equal to the rational dutiful actions of Hobbes’s rational actor. I demonstrate that rational investment in performative fictions is a “self-interested” (Frost, 2001) pursuit for both the Hobbesian subject and the participant in kayfabe production and argue that professional wrestling should be understood as its own performative discipline. I then debate the labour of kayfabe production in relation to extreme risk taking and pandemic-era performances by World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) professional wrestlers, interrogating the pandemic-era industry practices of the corporation itself. I also analyse the findings from live ethnographic study at a small UK independent promotion; Spotfest Wrestling Events, based in Dawley. These interrogations help to articulate both the performative investment by audiences in kayfabe, but also how subsequent interactions with the wider professional wrestling industry are based on similar practices of embodied, codified legibility. In doing so, I illustrate how an applied model of professional wrestling studies might contribute to the understanding of subject investment in communicative orders beyond the ring, including gender orders, capitalist orders and patriarchal societies.

Citation

Butler, L. S. (2025). Artifice, anarchy and ass-whoopin’: Hobbes in the squared circle [Unpublished doctoral thesis]. University of Chester.

Publisher

University of Chester

URI

https://chesterrep.openrepository.com/handle/10034/630048

Type

Thesis or dissertation